Borden to Corcoran CA high speed rail! Boy, is this stupid! $900M for high speed rail connecting two small towns. Let's call this high speed rail to national bankruptcy.
Train to Nowhere
December 1, 2010, 3:14 pm
Apparently, Congress just before the election appropriated $900 million to build part of a high speed rail line in CA. Rather than focusing either on LA or SF, Congress apparently appropriated the money for a mostly rural district that just coincidentally had a Democratic Congressman embroiled in a difficult election. So now Congress has dedicated a billion dollars of your money for this high speed rail line, from Borden to Corcoran:
I am not kidding you. More here from the AntiPlanner.
I discussed the CA high speed rail project here and here. I discussed the practice of building even one useless section as a way to commit the public to building the whole thing here. An excerpt of how this is done the Chicago way:
But what is really amazing is that Chicago embarked on building a $320 million downtown station for the project without even a plan for the rest of the line — no design, no route, no land acquisition, no appropriation, no cost estimate, nothing. There are currently tracks running near the station to the airport, but there are no passing sidings on these tracks, making it impossible for express and local trains to share the same track. The express service idea would either require an extensive rebuilding of the entire current line using signaling and switching technologies that may not (according to Daley himself) even exist, or it requires an entirely new line cut through some of the densest urban environments in the country. Even this critical decision on basic approach was not made before they started construction on the station, and in fact still has not been made.
[$320M for a high speed rail station that can't be used? Thats liberal transportation policy for ya. ]
coyoteblog.com
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Bram:
I like how it runs perfectly parallel to the 5 and 99 Freeways through a sparsely populated section of CA. The uselessness is obvious to anyone who can read a map.
To the 3 people who live in Borden and work in Corcoran, this is going to be great. We would save a lot of money if we just gave each of them $10 million to move.
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Jim:
Makes perfect sense…as much sense as the mayor and people of progressive Palo Alto who are NIMBY about high-speed “green” rail going through their zip code.
Can’t connect to SF without going through PA
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Fast Train to Nowhere
posted in News commentary, Transportation |
The federal government’s most recent $900 million grant to the California High-Speed Rail Authority came with a string attached: most of the money had to be spent, not in Los Angeles or San Francisco where most potential rail patrons are located, but in the central valley. Handed out just before the election, the grant was a blatant attempt to help the re-election effort of U.S. Representative Jim Costa. It might have made a difference, for despite the fact that Costa’s district leans heavily Democrat, he won over an unknown Republican candidate by a mere 3,000 votes.
But now California has to deal with the fact that it only has enough funds to build a high-speed train to nowhere. The authority expects to vote tomorrow on whether to start construction from Borden to Corcoran. To be fair, the route would go through Fresno, but it wouldn’t take anyone in Fresno to anywhere they might want to go at a high speed: Borden is barely a dot on the map, while Corcoran is the home of Charles Manson and his fellow prisoners.
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Fiscal conservatives hope to derail this project before so much money is spent that Congress will feel obligated to come up with another $20 or $30 billion just to finish the project. Surprisingly, one of the critics is Democratic Congressman Dennis Cardoza, who represents Merced. In a letter to Secretary of Immobility Ray LaHood, Cardoza called the plan a “gross misuse” of taxpayer funds.
Of course, rail advocates think that anyone who questions this project is a right-wing ideologue. What does that make them?
ti.org
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Heroic Assumptions
January 14, 2010, 8:25 am Previously, I have criticized the proposed California high speed rail line (from San Diego to San Francisco) as grossly underestimating potential costs. Brian Doherty has an article this week reality-checking its projected ridership, after the California legislative analysts’ office questioned the contingency analysis in the high-speed rail plan.
Eric Thronson, a fiscal and policy analyst for the office, called a risk assessment in the business plan “incomplete and inappropriate for a project of this magnitude.”
Thronson warned that there is no backup plan to keep the rail system solvent if it fails to draw 41 million people yearly. A bond measure approved by voters to help pay for the train network prohibits public funds from being spent on operating costs.
Doherty provides this reality check:
The future: where all of California’s fiscal messes wait to be addressed! By the way, that ridership figure of 41 million averages to over 112,000 train riders every single day of the year. The average daily usage of I-5–the entire road–is around 71,000, according to the Federal Highway Administration.
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coyoteblog.com
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James H:
Yeah, but airplanes are sooo 20th century. Trains are cool, and the new mode of transportation for the 21st century! Plus, think of all the jobs created or saved building and operating the rail. These will be high-paid, gold-plated benefit, union jobs that will propel California into prosperity right?
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KTWO:
Again the only explanation is that these projects usually have little or nothing to do with transportation.
They are decade long transfers of bond money to politicians and associates, they boost public employment, enrich the bond salesmen, the construction industry, and equipment manufacturers.
Then in a decade or two the system will have some riders. Perhaps revenue will even cover operating costs. Or not. Whatever. That just doesn’t matter. No one is responsible.
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